Monday, April 25, 2011

Although Search Engine Optimization may seem like a complex, ever-changing concept to many people, there are many basic SEO concepts people can apply to their websites in order to get better search engine results. Two of these concepts are Keyword Density and Keyword proximity.

Keyword Density is the ratio of keywords or keyword phrases to the total number of words on a web page. You must integrate a substantial amount of keywords or keyword phrases within your meta tags and website copy in order to ensure that you have proper keyword density. An example of a keyword is the word "travel," while an example of a popular keyword phrase is "refinancing home mortgage." A good keyword density for your pages would be anywhere from 1% to 7%. In order to have a keyword density of 1%, you must insert your keyword or keyword phrase once into every hundred words of text. The best approach to getting great rankings with search engines is to use properly researched keywords or keyword phrases in your website copy. Try to find keywords or keyword phrases that have over a million hits, but a low number of competing websites. Select two or three of these keywords or keyword phrases related to the subject of your website and, use them five times for every hundred words of website copy.

Although it’s important to have proper keyword density, you should avoid “keyword stuffing.” Keyword stuffing is when you overload the content or your webpage’s meta tags of the web page with every possible keyword or phrase that relates to the site in many different forms. For example, a bad meta description for our a paper site would read as follows: “paper, copy paper, printer paper, laser printer paper, Xerox paper, typing paper.” Note that this example has only keywords, with no sentence structure. If your site contains an unnaturally high density of one single keyword, your site will actually drop in search engine rankings.

Keyword Proximity refers to the distance in space, as measured in words, between two keywords or two keyword phrases. The proximity of a keyword or keyword phrase in relation to each other and other keywords or keyword phrases is extremely important when determining how to use keyword or keyword phrase combinations in page titles and page content. The smaller the distance between the words, the more relevant the page is considered by a search engine query. It’s particularly important to avoid using “stop words” between your keywords or keywords phrases if possible. Stop words are short words and, or, a, as etc., that often introduce a new subject. Search engines will sometimes interpret a keyword used after a stop word as having no relation to the keyword used before it. The word “stops” the relationship.

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